Books: Scars of Childhood

THE WOUND AND THE Bow—Edmund Wilson—Houghton Miff I in ($3).

Edmund Wilson's ranking among topflight U.S. literary critics will not be bolstered by his new book. But he still writes, as few Americans can, with the dry-wine deftness of a cultivated Frenchman. And his findings are still of value to all serious students of literature.

The Wound and the Bow takes its title from the legend of Philoctetes, who was first abandoned by the Greeks during the Trojan war because of a noisome, incurable wound, then sought out by them because of his magically invincible...